Collected Earlier Poems by Anthony Hecht Page A

plates upon their parasols,
    Or somersaults that do not touch the ground,
                   Or tossing seven balls
    In Most Celestial Order round and round.
    A child’s quick sense of the ingenious stamped
    All their invention: toys I used to get
    At Christmastime, or the peculiar, cramped
                   Look of their alphabet.
        Fragile and easily destroyed,
        Those little boats of celluloid
    Driven by camphor round the bathroom sink,
    And delicate the folded paper prize
                   Which, dropped into a drink
    Of water, grew up right before your eyes.
    Now when we reached them it was with a sense
    Sharpened for treachery compounding in their brains
    Like mating weasels; our Intelligence
                   Said: The Black Dragon reigns
        Secretly under yellow skin,
        Deeper than dyes of atabrine
    And deadlier. The War Department said:
    Remember you are Americans; forsake
                   The wounded and the dead
    At your own cost; remember Pearl and Wake.
    And yet they bowed us in with ceremony,
    Told us what brands of Sake were the best,
    Explained their agriculture in a phony
                   Dialect of the West,
        Meant vaguely to be understood
        As a shy sign of brotherhood
    In the old human bondage to the facts
    Of day-to-day existence. And like ants,
                   Signaling tiny pacts
    With their antennae, they would wave their hands.
    At last we came to see them not as glib
    Walkers of tightropes, worshipers of carp,
    Nor yet a species out of Adam’s rib
                   Meant to preserve its warp
        In Cain’s own image. They had learned
        That their tough eye-born goddess burned
    Adoring fingers. They were very poor.
    The holy mountain was not moved to speak.
                   Wind at the paper door
    Offered them snow out of its hollow peak.
    Human endeavor clumsily betrays
    Humanity. Their excrement served in this;
    For, planting rice in water, they would raise
                   Schistosomiasis
        Japonica, that enters through
        The pores into the avenue
    And orbit of the blood, where it may foil
    The heart and kill, or settle in the brain.
                   This fruit of their nightsoil
    Thrives in the skull, where it is called insane.
    Now the quaint early image of Japan
    That was so charming to me as a child
    Seems like a bright design upon a fan,
                   Of water rushing wild
        On rocks that can be folded up,
        A river which the wrist can stop
    With a neat flip, revealing merely sticks
    And silk of what had been a fan before,
                   And like such winning tricks,
    It shall be buried in excelsior.
LE MASSEUR DE MA SOEUR
I
    My demoiselle, the cats are in the street,
    Making a shrill cantata to their kind,
    Accomplishing their furry, vigorous feat,
    And I observe you shiver at it. You
    Would rather have their little guts preserved
    In the sweet excellence of a string quartet.
    But, speaking for myself, I do not mind
    This boisterous endeavor; it can do
    Miracles for a lady who’s unnerved
    By the rude leanings of a family pet.
II
    What Argus could not see was not worth seeing.
    The fishy slime of his one hundred eyes
    Shimmered all over his entire being
    To lubricate his vision. A Voyeur
    Of the first order, he would hardly blench
    At the fine calculations of your dress.
    Doubtless the moonlight or the liquor lies
    Somewhere beneath this visible
bonheur
,
    Yet I would freely translate from the French
    The labials of such fleet happiness.
III
    “If youth were all, our plush minority
    Would lack no instrument to trick it out;
    All cloth would emphasize it; not a bee
    Could lecture us in offices of bliss.
    Then all the appetites, arranged in rows,
    Would dance cotillions absolute as ice
    In high decorum rather than in rout.”
    He